This weekend I got around to testing out the latest updates to the Poulsbo (Intel GMA 500 graphics chipset I have written about multiple times before) front. Newer versions of the kernel module, the firmware and the GLX module have trickled into the Ubuntu secret sauce repository over the last few weeks.

Happily, they produce a significant improvement in behaviour with Fedora 11. With the latest version of everything from the Ubuntu repo, the hangs I and others were seeing around 30 minutes after starting X seem to have gone away, which is great. Also, 3D acceleration appears to be working! It’s not incredibly fast, but very importantly, it’s fast enough to run Compiz with basic settings pretty smoothly. This means desktop rendering is smoother than before, and also takes some of the rendering load off the CPU and 2D core to free them up for other tasks, so that’s great. You can even enable some of the Compiz effects – wobbly windows and the cube work pretty well, haven’t tried anything more complex yet.

I am working on a cleaned-up set of packages which should be installable without any hacking around (mainly by making libdrm-poulsbo obsolete libdrm, rather than just conflict with it). I intend to publish these up as a proper yum repository, with dependencies enforced, so you can just add the repo and then install the main driver package, and it will pull in everything else you need.